In Alain Resnais' Wild
Grass (Les herbes folles), many things happen that are impossible to describe. Resnais' famously idiosyncratic
style and clinical approach to psychodrama render plot and behavior
so charged with the potential for literally anything to happen, that
I find myself at a loss for words - especially since this intuitive unpredictability
is the chief feature of the film's tone. Resnais' characters
speak, make choices, and interact with one another in ways that at
first seems "normal." But the tension that creeps under the
surface, and the filmmaker's visual choices - among other factors
- subtly alter the plot and dialogue in wholly unexpected ways, placing
attempts at gathering meaning and significance tantalizingly beyond
arm's reach. I do not suggest that Resnais' films are in any
way devoid of tangible content, but at least in the instance of Wild
Grass, that content is only partially accessible to this writer.
Wild Grass is rich in incident, visual information, oblique thematic
gestures, obfuscatory dialogue, and hard left turns against the grain
of expectation. There is a lot to process here, and the film demands
multiple viewings and a lot of meditation.

Resnais' style in Wild
Grass is not enormously different from many of his other films:
the camera is fluid, there is some tricky editing that achieves unusual
effects, and characters' motivations are often veiled. These
elements are a large part of what make Wild Grass ceaselessly
fascinating; they also prevent a really incisive discussion of the film based on a single viewing.
What is intended for the big screen often cannot be translated into
words, and a master of cinematic form such as Resnais will confound
a writer every step of the way. Writers more confident in their
craft than I will go to great lengths to create strings of sentences
jam-packed with the language of critical theory, fooling readers with
a web of "insights" that only stand as an obstacle to the film itself.
What they won't admit is that there is something going on here that
is simply impossible to translate into their chosen medium.

Nonetheless, I will describe
a few of the most important things that happen in Wild Grass. First,
a woman named Marguerite Muir (Sabine Azéma) has her purse snatched
outside a Marc Jacobs in Paris. Next, Georges Palet (André Dussollier)
finds Marguerite's discarded wallet in a parking garage. Palet,
a married man who lives with a dark and undisclosed secret, seeks to
return the wallet personally to Marguerite. When she proves elusive,
Palet leaves it with the police. Marguerite retrieves the wallet
from the police and then feels compelled to thank Palet, which leads
to a series of awkward phone calls and attempts at communication.
Palet finds himself revealing some of his deepest desires, including
his passion for airplanes; as an amateur pilot, Marguerite eventually
agrees to take him up in her small plane. By this point, Palet's
wife (Anne Consigny) and Marguerite's friend Josepha (Emmanuelle Devos)
have been drawn into this odd relationship, which has gone through a
number of iterations before finally achieving a strained mutual understanding.

Wild Grass moves in
the slow but irresistible manner of a lava flow, and the film's depiction
of elemental human desires suggests the bubbling action of submerged
primordial impulses. Color is of immense importance, varying from
neutral earth tones to crazily gaudy neons; the production design is
meticulous and forceful in this regard. The loving, fluid widescreen
camerawork of the great Éric Gautier and a remarkably graceful editorial
style (thanks to regular Renais and Polanski collaborator Hervé de
Luze) merge in some striking imagery, particularly during the film's
final sequence, which concludes with a pulse-pounding series of pans
and cuts across an alien, barren landscape before delivering a final
blow with one of the most jaw-dropping lines of dialogue of all time.

At age 88, Alain Resnais is
in no way off his game. Wild Grass challenges viewers to
engage with cinema in an unusually intense way. Nothing is to
be taken for granted, nothing is done for the sake of storytelling convenience,
and every assumption we have about the conventions of filmmaking is
challenged whenever possible. The inventive and eclectic score
by Mark Snow matches the rapid shifts in tone, from the comic to the
foreboding, and there is an unnamed narrator whose relationship to the
film's characters and events is wholly nebulous. There are suggestions
of infidelity that may or may not have happened, a group of singing
pilots, occasional dental work, and expensive shoes. Wild Grass
is an investigation of deep-set human brain activity - the ways and
means by which we perceive and process information and experience.
As a counterpoint to the easy solipsistic "answers" provided by
most films, Renais has composed a searching, fascinating question.